Additional interviewees included the former IT director for the DAS, Rafael García, who became a witness in investigations of the DAS, and a former DAS member who was a source for Calderón, Alexander Menjura.
Miladis and Maryori Restrepo Torres shared their painful memories of the El Aro massacre.
Other interviewees, including a former US official, asked not to be named.
Ricardo Calderón shared a great deal of documentary material and audio and video recordings corroborating his reporting and allowing me to flesh out details for the book. The case files on the Parqueadero Padilla case, Jesús María Valle’s murder, and the El Aro massacre also contained critical documents backing up the statements of many of my sources. Other documentary sources included rulings by the Supreme Court and by the Justice and Peace Tribunal in Medellín; publicly available testimony in the parapolitics cases; the first CTI report and testimony given by multiple witnesses in the investigations of the DAS illegal surveillance scandal; and video recordings of testimony by several witnesses, including Iván Roberto Duque (aka “Ernesto Báez”) and José Orlando Moncada (aka “Tasmania”) in the case against attorney Sergio González over the Tasmania scandal.
The Semana, El Colombiano, El Tiempo, and El Espectador news archives, as well as the website VerdadAbierta.com, a nonprofit providing in-depth reporting on Colombia’s conflict, offered a wealth of valuable information, as did reporting by several journalists for foreign media, including Sibylla Brodzinsky, Juan Forero, John Otis, Simón Romero, Steven Dudley, and Jeremy McDermott. The Colombian journalist Juan Diego Restrepo has also written extensively about the situation in the Medellín attorney general’s office in the late 1990s. My own Human Rights Watch reporting in Colombia between 2004 and 2010, as well as that of my predecessor as Colombia researcher, Robin Kirk, and my successor, Max Schoening (all available on www.hrw.org/americas/colombia), were also references. US cables that have been declassified and are available through the National Security Archive at George Washington University, as well as cables leaked to the website Wikileaks, provided additional useful information.
Many public events described in the book, including press conferences, congressional hearings in Colombia, the ceremony in which US president George W. Bush awarded Uribe the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the first signing of Colombia’s peace agreement with the FARC, were recorded on videos that are available online.
I have used numbers sparingly in the book; where statistics do appear, their sources are noted in the text or in this section. Numbers concerning Colombia’s conflict—homicide and kidnapping rates, total numbers of people killed or displaced, estimates of combatants—often vary wildly according to source. Numbers are often political tools in Colombia and used by different actors to support their versions of history. During the Uribe administration, the government used numbers particularly effectively to build a narrative according to which Colombia’s conflict was largely becoming a thing of the past. More recent analysis by data expert Patrick Ball suggests that this analysis was at least partly incorrect. See Patrick Ball and Michael Reed Hurtado, “Cuentas y mediciones de la criminalidad y de la violencia,” Forensis 16, no. 1 (2014): 529, available at www.medicinalegal.gov.co/documents/88730/1656998/Forensis+Interactivo+2014.24-JULpdf.pdf/9085ad79-d2a9-4c0d-a17b-f845ab96534b (Forensis is the magazine for Colombia’s Institute of Forensic Medicine). See also P. Ball and M. Reed, “El registro y la medición de la criminalidad: El problema de los datos faltantes y el uso de la ciencia para producir estimaciones en relación con el homicidio en Colombia, demostrado a partir de un ejemplo, el departamento de Antioquia (2003–2011),” Revista Criminalidad 58, no. 1 (2016): 9–23, https://hrdag.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/criminality-registration-Colombia-PBall-2016.pdf.
According to Ball, official datasets on homicides remained pretty flat from about 2003 to 2011. Yet in 2006, estimates—based on those datasets—of undocumented homicides in the regions of Antioquia and Valle del Cauca (which were the focus of the analysis) skyrocketed. In subsequent discussions of the study, Ball suggested that there could be multiple explanations for the fact that official figures did not capture these killings, including that official sources “overflowed” when homicides increased. In other words, they covered what they could, but in times of increasing violence, they simply didn’t have the capacity to document more than they normally did. It was also possible that, for various reasons, officials chose not to document the additional cases.
The following books cover some of the events described in this book and offer additional information:
Abad Colorado, Jesús. Mirar de la Vida Profunda. Bogotá: Paralelo 10, 2015.
Abad Faciolince, Héctor. Oblivion. Translation of El Olvido Que Seremos. Anne McLean and Rosalind Harvey, translators. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012.
Aranguren Molina, Mauricio. Carlos Castaño: Mi Confesión. Bogotá: Editorial La Oveja Negra, 2001.
Betancourt, Ingrid. No Hay Silencio Que No Termine. Bogotá: Aguilar, 2010.
Bowden, Mark. Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World’s Greatest Outlaw. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2001.
Braun, Herbert. The Assassination of Gaitán: Public Life and Urban Violence in Colombia. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985.
Brodzinsky, Sibylla, and Max Schoening. Throwing Stones at the Moon: Narratives from Colombians Displaced by Violence. San Francisco: McSweeney’s and Voice of Witness, 2012.
Bushnell, David. The Making of Modern Colombia: A Nation in Spite of Itself. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
Comisión Nacional de Réparación y Reconciliación, Grupo de Memoria Histórica. Bojayá: La Guerra Sin Límites. Bogotá: Aguilar, Altea, Taurus, Alfaguara, 2010.
Coronell, Daniel. Recordar es Morir. Bogotá: Aguilar, 2016.
Dudley, Steven. Walking Ghosts: Murder and Guerrilla Politics in Colombia. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Duzán, María Jimena. Así Gobierna Uribe. Bogotá: Planeta, 2004.
Ferry, Stephen. Violentology: A Manual of the Colombian Conflict. New York: Umbrage Editions, 2012.
Instituto Popular de Capacitación and Corporación Jurídica Libertad. Memoria de la Impunidad en Antioquia: Lo Que La Justicia No Quiso Ver Frente Al Paramilitarismo. Medellín: Pregón, 2010.
Kirk, Robin. More Terrible Than Death: Massacres, Drugs, and America’s War in Colombia. New York: Public Affairs, 2003.
Otis, John. Law of the Jungle: The Hunt for Colombian Guerrillas, American Hostages, and Buried Treasure. New York: William Morrow, 2010.
Palacios, Marco. Between Legitimacy and Violence: A History of Colombia, 1875–2002. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.
Roldán, Mary. Blood and Fire: La Violencia in Antioquia, Colombia, 1946–1953. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.
Ronderos, María Teresa. Guerras Recicladas: Una Historia Periodística del Paramilitarismo en Colombia. Bogotá: Aguilar, 2014.
Safford, Frank, and Marco Palacios. Colombia: Fragmented Land, Divided Society. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Salazar, Alonso. La Parábola de Pablo: Auge y Caída de un Gran Capo del Narcotráfico. Bogotá: Planeta, 2012.
Soto, Martha. Velásquez: El Retador del Poder. Bogotá: Intermedio Editores, 2016.
Uribe Vélez, Álvaro. No Lost Causes. New York: Celebra, 2012.
PROLOGUE
Part of the prologue is based on notes from my interview with Rodrigo Zapata. Additional information came from the January 30, 2017, ruling in his case by the Justice and Peace Tribunal of Medellín, which convicted him of various offenses, including homicide. The ruling is available at Tribunal Superior de Distrito, Sala de Conocimiento de Justicia y Paz, January 30, 2017, https://www.ramajudicial.gov.co/documents/6342975/6634902/30.01.2017-sentencia-bloque-pacifico-frente-suroeste-rodrigo-zapata-sierra-y-otros.pdf/286792b7–084b-415a-89f3-e664b5bd8af0. As of this writing, Zapata has appealed.
PART I: DEATH
A copy of Jesús Marí
a Valle’s November 20, 1996, letter to Governor Álvaro Uribe was among the papers his family kept.
The account of the assassination of Jorge Eliecer Gaitán is largely drawn from Herbert Braun’s The Assassination of Gaitán: Public Life and Urban Violence in Colombia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985). Some of the details about La Violencia’s impact in Antioquia are drawn from Mary Roldán, Blood and Fire: La Violencia in Antioquia, Colombia, 1946–1953 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002).
The quotation about the state of siege during La Violencia came from Marco Palacios, Between Legitimacy and Violence: A History of Colombia, 1875–2002 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).
The stories from Valle’s childhood came primarily from his sister Magdalena.
The account of the assassination of Dr. Héctor Abad Gómez is drawn from Oblivion, the English translation of the memoir written by his son, Héctor Abad Faciolince, titled El Olvido Que Seremos, translated by Anne McLean and Rosalind Harvey (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), though additional details were provided by other witnesses. The quotation from the kill list including Abad’s name also comes from Oblivion.
Details about the 1996 La Granja massacre are drawn from the ruling by the Inter-American Court on Human Rights on the La Granja and El Aro massacres.
The quotations from Valle are drawn from video recordings and the case file of his homicide.
The account of Valle’s meeting with Uribe on December 9, 1996, is based largely on the account of a witness who asked not to be named. That account is partly corroborated by a statement that Valle gave on February 6, 1998, to a prosecutor in Medellín. In that statement, Valle described a meeting he had with Uribe and others to inform the governor of the deaths in Ituango. At the meeting, Valle said that Uribe “sent us to talk to General Manosalva (r.i.p.). After the visit, the governor did nothing, and… in the commission to Ituango… he cleverly took me off the commission so I could not go, and the bloodshed continued.”
Former President Uribe did not respond to a March 15, 2017, set of written questions for this book. These included questions about his version of events of the December 9, 1996, meeting, such as whether Uribe recalled the meeting, whether Valle had told him about having evidence about collusion between the military and paramilitaries in Ituango, whether Uribe called General Manosalva and told him that Valle was falsely accusing the military of collusion and should be sued, whether Uribe told Valle that he should present his allegations to Manosalva, whether Valle told him he had evidence of mass graves in Ituango, whether Uribe organized a committee to visit Ituango—with Valle—by helicopter the following Saturday, and whether Valle was informed at the last minute that he could not join the group by helicopter. The same questionnaire also included questions about, among other issues, Uribe’s views on the Convivirs, his knowledge of paramilitary activity in Antioquia when he was governor, his response to the massacre of La Granja, Ituango, in July 1996, his recollection of Valle’s reports of paramilitary abuses and military collusion, the El Aro massacre, and his alleged statement accusing Valle of being an enemy of the armed forces.
Uribe’s quotation, cited in Chapter 1, in which he backs the Fourth Brigade commander’s account of an alleged FARC attack in Ituango, which Valle challenged, was reported in “Connivencia en Antioquia entre Fuerza Pública y Paramilitares No Fue una Ficción” (Collusion in Antioquia Between Public Security Forces and Paramilitaries Was Not Fiction), Semana, February 25, 2008. It is unclear whether it was previously reported elsewhere.
The unclassified US cable calling Governor Álvaro Uribe a “bright star in the Liberal Party firmament” is Cable Bogota 003714, March 1995, available through the National Security Archive.
The quotation from Uribe about witnessing Liberal guerrillas coming to his house as a child comes from the English translation of his autobiography, No Lost Causes (New York: Celebra, 2012), 54.
Some of the history about Pablo Escobar is drawn from Alonso Salazar’s La Parábola de Pablo: Auge y Caída de un Gran Capo del Narcotráfico (Bogotá: Planeta, 2012) and Mark Bowden’s Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World’s Greatest Outlaw (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2001), among other sources.
The account of Velásquez’s early effort, with Uribe and Álvaro Villegas, to get Pablo Escobar to turn himself in came from interviews with Velásquez. Álvaro Villegas also confirmed it to journalist Martha Soto, according to her book, Velásquez: El Retador del Poder (Bogotá: Intermedio Editores, 2016). Pablo Escobar’s letter to the Colombian government can also be found in an appendix to that book. The March 15, 2017, questionnaire sent to Uribe asked for his account of these events.
The decree authorizing the establishment of the Convivir program was Decree 356 of February 11, 1994.
Then governor Uribe’s quotations about the Convivir program in Chapter 2 come from “Las Convivir Apoyan a la Fuerza Pública” (The Convivirs Support the Public Security Forces), El Tiempo, November 11, 1997.
The account of the El Aro massacre is based primarily on interviews with Miladis and Maryori Restrepo, as well as a review of excerpts of the El Aro case file; the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruling in the El Aro and La Granja massacres; rulings of the Justice and Peace Tribunal in Medellín in the cases of Jesús Ignacio Roldan (“Monoleche”), Ramiro (“Cuco”) Vanoy, and Juan Fernando Chica; and interviews with prosecutor Amelia Pérez, attorney María Victoria Fallon, and Amparo Areiza, among others. In the years since the massacre, several women have told investigators that they were raped during the massacre, but in the immediate aftermath of the slaughter, most remained silent out of fear or shame. Miladis’s exchange with “Junior” is based on her account. Junior has admitted to having participated in the El Aro incursion and is in prison for various paramilitary crimes.
Carlos Castaño’s comment about the El Aro massacre was quoted in an article in Semana titled “Las Cicatrices de El Aro” on October 21, 2008, available at www.semana.com/nacion/conflicto-armado/articulo/las-cicatrices-el-aro/96472-3.
The account of Valle’s murder is based on the statements of Nelly Valle as well as the case file on his homicide. In 2014, the Angulo brothers, mentioned in Chapters 4 and 8, were ordered detained in connection with the El Aro massacre; the Supreme Court also approved a prosecutor’s motion that the investigation against them in connection with Valle’s murder be reopened. It is unclear, based on publicly available information, where these investigations stand. It does not appear that they have ever been charged in connection with the drug-trafficking allegations made by witness Carlos Jaramillo and mentioned by others.
PART II: THE HUNT
Relatively little has been written about this chapter of Colombian history. As a result, this section is overwhelmingly based on my own reporting.
One exception is Memoria de la Impunidad en Antioquia: Lo Que La Justicia No Quiso Ver Frente Al Paramilitarismo (Medellín: Pregón, 2010), a lengthy book written jointly by the Medellín-based organizations Instituto Popular de Capacitación and Corporacion Jurídica Libertad. It contains a great deal of detailed information about many of the cases that the chief prosecutor’s office for Antioquia was handling at the end of the 1980s. It also includes accounts of several of the killings of CTI investigators, as well as analysis of possible explanations.
Carlos Mario Aguilar, the former CTI agent who was mentioned in Chapter 5 as having been involved in recruiting other CTI agents to work with the Envigado Office, was years later reported to have become the head of the Envigado Office. In 2008, he turned himself in to US authorities and served several years in prison in New York pursuant to a plea bargain. News reports indicate that he completed his sentence in 2015 and that he may have remained free in the United States.
“Junior” and “Cobra,” both of whom Francisco Villalba identified, in Chapter 6, as participants in the El Aro massacre, are also mentioned as commanders of troops who participated in the massacre in a February 2, 2015, ruling by the Justice a
nd Peace Tribunal of Medellín in the case of paramilitary leader Ramiro Vanoy. That ruling, which discusses the El Aro massacre at length, is available at República de Colombia, Rama Judicial del Poder Público, Tribunal Superior de Medellín, Sala de Justicia y Paz, February 2, 2015, https://www.ramajudicial.gov.co/documents/6342975/6634902/1.+2015.02.02+Sent_Bl_Mineros-ramiro-vanoy-murillo.pdf. Junior is in prison for various paramilitary crimes. There is no recent public information about Cobra’s whereabouts.
PART III: HOPE
On September 1, 2014, the Justice and Peace Chamber of the Court of Bogotá convicted Luis Eduardo Cifuentes, aka “The Eagle,” of several crimes related to his involvement in the paramilitaries, including multiple homicides. The ruling is available at Tribunal Superior de Bogotá, Sala de Justicia y Paz, September 1, 2014, www.fiscalia.gov.co/jyp/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/2014-09-01-SENTENCIA-BLOQUE-CUNDINAMARCA-1-sep-2014.pdf. The charges did not include drug trafficking, though prosecutors told the court that several of the defendants in the case had confessed that they had obtained resources for the group from drug trafficking.
The numbers of victims in the Bojayá massacre of 2002, when the FARC lobbed a gas cylinder bomb into the town of Bellavista, comes from Comisión Nacional de Reparación y Reconciliación, Grupo de Memoria Histórica, Bojayá: La Guerra Sin Límites (Bogotá: Aguilar, Altea, Taurus, Alfaguara, 2010).
The quotations from Uribe in Chapter 9, about being in the bullring, come from his No Lost Causes (New York: Celebra, 2012), 45–46.
Some of the allegations about Uribe’s father’s connections with the Ochoa family and about Uribe’s actions at the Civil Aviation Agency appear in Joseph Contreras’s book, El Señor de las Sombras: Biografia No Autorizada de Álvaro Uribe Vélez (Bogotá: Oveja Negra, 2002). Other journalists, including Fabio Castillo, in the book Los Jinetes de la Cocaína (Bogotá: Editorial Documentos Periodísticos, 1987), had already published about some of them. According to the newspaper El Tiempo, Contreras’s book received some harsh criticism when it was published during the 2002 presidential campaign, with one editor stating that the book had been written “lightly,” though Contreras said it was the result of a serious investigation.
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